On January 10th, Beijing time, the 2025 WTT Doha Star Tournament continued. Today's matches mainly focused on singles, with both men's and women's singles playing two rounds, followed by the finals of women's doubles and men's doubles.
The first round of singles has concluded, with the Chinese national team performing well in the women's singles quarter-finals, successfully advancing five players to the quarter-finals. However, two male singles players, Xiang Peng and Huang Youzheng, were eliminated.
Moving on to the singles competition, we have reached the quarter-finals, where the focus is now on the women's singles. There is an internal battle within the Chinese team, with the No. 5 seed Qian Tianyi facing Chen Yi. In the previous round, Chen Yi had a major breakthrough, defeating the top seed Hina Hayata. The top three seeds have all been eliminated, with No. 2 Mima Ito and No. 3 Miyuu Kihara being eliminated earlier. Qian Tianyi also swept Indian player Manika Batra.
The match began with Qian Tianyi leading 3-0 at the start, playing well in the first three rallies, serving and attacking successfully, and decisively receiving serves to open a 7-1 lead, playing smoothly. Chen Yi then launched a counterattack, displaying her own ability to hold her ground, improving the quality of individual shots, catching up to an 8-8 tie, with a low trajectory in her pulls, very proactive, and won the game 11-9 in a reversal.
In the second set, Qian Tianyi still led 4-2 at the beginning of the stage, but Chen Yi quickly opened the situation through holding her ground, with high-quality holding play, and later both sides played fiercely, with the score entangled to 6-6. Chen Yi was still proactive in the holding process, quickly forming active scoring shots, and could continuously exert pressure, playing with speed and stability, winning another game 11-9.
Chen Yi continued her good form in the third set, scoring 3-0 in a row at the start, with Qian Tianyi calling a timeout. After falling behind 1-5, she scored through serving, but also made a serve error herself. She kept chasing points at the end of the game, saving three match points, but unfortunately made another serve error and a rushed pull error, losing the game 10-12. Chen Yi upset Qian Tianyi 3-0, successively defeating seeded players.
In a China-Japan matchup, He Zhuojia faced Miyu Nagasaki, resulting in a five-set battle where He Zhuojia narrowly lost 2-3. It was a pity that she lost after leading 2-0 in sets, failing to capitalize on an 8-6 lead in the fourth set. Overall, her performance was already quite good, but she may have lacked a bit of luck, especially after missing out on the opportunity to maintain her lead. In recent years, Miyu Nagasaki has not performed well, but this time she exploded, successfully seizing the opportunity after the main Japanese women's singles players were eliminated one after another.
Another Japanese woman advanced to the semifinals, with Miu Hirano delivering a stunning 3-0 victory over world runner-up Yubin Shin. It was unexpected that Miu Hirano was also in such good form, considering her inconsistent performance in the recent Chinese Super League.
This time, her overall performance was also excellent. The first set of the match was fiercely contested, but the next two sets were largely controlled by Miu Hirano, leaving Yubin Shin somewhat confused, resulting in the elimination of all South Korean women's singles players.
There was another quarter-final match in the women's singles, which was also an internal battle within the Chinese team. Ultimately, Kuai Man narrowly defeated Shi Xunyao 3-2. In this tournament, both of them were in good form, having previously defeated strong opponents; Kuai Man won against Miyuu Kihara, while Shi Xunyao defeated Yu Xiaoxiao Zhu.
The match was evenly matched, with both sides basically demonstrating their abilities. Kuai Man played more flexibly, with more line changes.